This is a lovely, even sweet, setting of a traditional Latin prayer to the Virgin Mary to intercede with her son on humanity's behalf. Herbert Howells (1892-1983) wrote it as he was just ending his student years and was embarking on a career that his mentors and contemporaries expected to be a brilliant one. (As it turned out, he established a mighty reputation as a choral and vocal writer, particularly of cathedral music, while his orchestral and instrumental music was neglected—unjustly, as late twentieth century revivals tended to show.) In 1915, he wrote Anthems (4) to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Op. 9. Only this one and a Regina Coeli are still extant. They are treated today as separate compositions. Howells' vision is gentle and ecstatic, pointed toward the promise of the prayer: after being expelled from Paradise and the resulting stay in this "vale of tears," that exile may end with meeting Christ. The setting is in a late-Romantic style, though it is informed with the teaching he had of the great English madrigalists. He had also been deeply affected by Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis (1910), and sought the same sort of luminous calm. The music is smooth in effect. It does not become agitated, even when the harmonies grow more bitter at the reference to the "vale of tears." At the end, a serene treble voice rises above the rest of the chorus as if in gentle welcome.

© Joseph Stevenson, All Music Guide